Mitt’s Mellow Loss in Tennessee

The air of inevitability that hangs around Mitt Romney’s Nashville campaign can only be compared to the Yankees clubhouse in October. It is calm, professional, well-funded, and the players are very clean-shaven. Last night, Romney lost Tennessee to Santorum, as well as Oklahoma; more damning, he barely eked out a victory in Ohio. But, at a results-watching party for Romney volunteers at the Renaissance Hotel, the mood was casual, if not jovial: a man with a “Romney for President” sticker played a guitar and sang mellow country songs; the televisions were muted, even as Romney delivered his remarks; and sun-kissed guests, sporting well-pressed suits, tortoise-shell glasses, and silk ties, gushed about the spring-like weather. The results in Tennessee weren’t particularly devastating—or even surprising—to the Romney camp, but his performance didn’t do anything to help the candidate, either, especially with more Southern primaries (Kansas, Alabama, and Mississippi) less than a week away. The Romney volunteers I spoke with were undeterred, dismissing any notion that Romney’s performance was worrisome. “I’m very optimistic,” John Shorter, a volunteer coördinator, said. “I’m disappointed in the state of Tennessee, but I believe overall that Governor Romney will be the nominee.”

“I’m not worried,” another supporter, in a yellow, elephant-print Burberry tie, said. “You have to remember that in 2008, Tennessee went for Mike Huckabee. Now, I was a Rudy Giuliani supporter back then, but, in the end, it didn’t mean much that the state went for Huckabee.” John Crisp, the Romney campaign’s Regional Chairman for Middle Tennessee, described it as “a good night overall,” and said, “We feel real good about the momentum.”

Bill Hagerty, the Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, spun Romney’s relatively weak showing in Tennessee into an all-out victory for the campaign. “This past week, we took a twenty-point gap and compressed it to a single digit gap, putting Mitt in the zone to get delegates here,” he said. At the end of February, Santorum led some Tennessee polls by as much as twenty-one per cent, but after an aggressive media push (a Super PAC supporting Romney spent over $4.6 million on media buys across the country between February 28th and March 5th) Santorum won the state by only nine percentage points. Hagerty characterized this as “a come-from-behind situation.” “It’s all about delegates tonight, and now we’re going to look across the board and say, ‘O.K., we’ve got a significant delegate lead now, and we’re going to send a message to the rest of the south.’ ”

The Southern primaries next week—Alabama and Mississippi—have ninety delegates between them. After yesterday’s contests, Romney, with three hundred and eighty-one delegates (two hundred and twenty-one more than Santorum), is only a third of the way to the more than eleven hundred needed to win the nomination. Santorum’s scrappy image and socially conservative values will play well in the South, but those states, with Louisiana, on March 24th, will likely be the last major stumbling blocks for Romney. In April, the primary battles will shift to more moderate states, and Romney’s well-oiled machine is expected to sweep. “Governor Romney is running a fifty-state campaign,” Crisp said. “There’s a certain baseline of operations, and to a large extent it’s all about delegates.”

We may yet see more twists and turns in this primary cycle, but among the Romney campaign there’s a recognizable swagger: it’s the Yankees of yesteryear, with a one-run lead at the end of the sixth, handing the ball over to QuanGorMo—relievers Paul Quantrill, Tom Gordon, and Mariano Rivera—to finish it off.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

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